The Add-on Guidelines Find a Home

We introduced the Add-on Guidelines a few months ago, setting a common bar all add-ons need to pass, regardless of whether they are hosted on AMO or not. We also promised a more permanent location for them, which is now set up at MDN: Add-on Guidelines.

This doesn’t change their enforcement in any way. These guidelines have been in effect since we announced them, and the modifications they’ve had since have been very minor. Also, the document is currently awaiting editorial review, which means they’ll go through some readability improvements in the future. Any major changes to the guidelines will be announced on this blog.

The document explains how to get in touch with us if you want to report a violation. Millions of add-on users will have their online experiences improved with your help.

4 responses

So if one were to file a bug about an application that installs an add-on without any notice and/or bypasses the add-on opt-in screen, or, they don’t provide a way to uninstall it, Mozilla would contact the developer to address it?
I understand that doing so for individual add-on developers is usually easy, but what if it’s a large company for example, Avast, Check Point (ZoneAlarm) etc. It could take a while for them to provide an update and would Mozilla still be able to block add-ons installed along with 3rd party software?

I still on occasion come across some software that sneaks something in and the only way to remove it is by going through the Windows Registry. I also don’t like even seeing these add-ons in the add-ons manager when I decided not to install them even if they are disabled.

Yes, we will contact them, even large developers. We’re in conversations with many of them already. They are responsible for the people who distribute their add-ons, so we also contact them when someone else is using a bad installer to sneak their add-on in.

As for improving the uninstall experience for those add-ons, that’s something we want to tackle soon.